RevenueCat, a company tied to Mobile Economy, is currently preparing to expand its business with one new subscription app being launched under Software. Leveraging market positions, including the power of subscriptions for over 70,000 mobile apps, RevenueCat’s growth plan will focus on solving more common problems faced by mobile developers using an understanding of the mobile industry.
After the court’s ruling in Apple-EPIC anti-trust battle, the company’s focus will include helping developers determine whether it’s the right time to support web-based payments. RevenueCat also offers tools to do so.
To drive that growth, RevenueCat raised $50 million in Series C funding in a round led by existing investor Bain Capital. Returning investors such as index ventures, Y-combinators, adjacent to Volo Ventures
The Saastr Fund also participated.
The fund extended RevenueCat’s previous $12 million Series C since last year, increasing its total increase to $100 million. With additional capital, the startup is currently valued at $500 million, post money – or “half corn.”
“Where we are, this gives us room to grow… I think we can build a public company,” Eiting tells TechCrunch.
The key to the company’s growth is the next product RevenueCat has on its roadmap.
Initially, the future of RevenueCat involves solving the broader problems facing mobile developers, as they were interested in making subscriptions easier to implement without the need to write much code.
EITION compares the next stage of a company’s growth with something like Shopify’s e-commerce platform. Initially, Shopify provided tools to run an online storefront with subscriptions as a service, but later expanded to a wider e-commerce business, including fulfillment, lending, app marketplaces and more.
“We know a lot about this industry,” explains App Economy Eating. “There’s a lot in common between all of these businesses. Common issues that have not been solved. We’re in a position to solve them now.”
Specifically, RevenuECAT aims to help developers with other aspects of their business beyond billing and subscriptions in areas such as customer acquisition (it has become a more challenging issue after the deployment of Apple’s anti-tracking technology or ATT).
Within its core business, RevenuECAT is working to improve purchase point acquisitions to help developers turn customers into paid subscribers. The company has also launched new tools, such as a drag-and-drop paywall editor and new tools for apps that offer cryptocurrency.
Recently, the company shifted its focus to web payments as an Apple-Epic court ruling caused a flood of interest in RevenueCat’s web claims engine and launched its beta last fall. The team quietly repeated the product prior to the court’s decision, so Apple allowed in-app links to external purchases without any fees.
Today, the tool competes with stripes, repeats, chargebees, and more, but is specifically built to meet the needs of mobile app developers.
Currently, just over 2,000 developers are trying out RevenueCat’s billing service.
The company is not only providing tools to help developers adopt new technologies. But it also provides insight into whether they should.
It is a spicy audiobook app called Dipsea, which runs experiments on RevenueCat, a consumer mobile app that was acquired last year. The company can test how changes in billing will affect app revenue. For example, it may make no sense for a small business developer who only pays a 15% fee to Apple to try and process the payments themselves.
These tests can provide the industry (and perhaps Apple itself) with data on what in-app purchases (IAPs) are truly valuable. Apple’s claims committee may turn out that, depending on what the data shows, do not require a large discount from the standard 30%.
“I don’t think Apple did that, so I’m happy to be able to actually do some experiments,” Eiting tells TechCrunch. “We’re excited to finally get some data and finally resolve the argument, or at least enrich the argument.”
Another area of impacting RevenueCat’s business is AI.
In addition to providing payment infrastructure to customers such as the CHATGPT app and OpenAI, other AI model providers, RevenuECAT is facing an explosion of “vibe coded” apps built by developers who leverage AI technology to handle the coding process. Eating recalls talking to his kids about atmosphere coding on school career day, and a month and a half later, the kids shipped the basic app to the app store.
“You can’t program your kids, but you built the app in two months,” he says. “It was very compacted considering my journey was to reach that point, and that would affect the economy in ways that I wouldn’t even really understand at this point.”
This shift in how apps are built can be seen looking at RevenueCat, working with companies that provide AI-powered coding tools.
The new fund will also support RevenuECAT’s acquisition efforts to build and hire the next product, and accelerate fuel mergers and growth.
“I think we’ve actually gotten quite good at building targeted engineering and product teams and chasing things, and we want to expand that as much as possible,” Eiting says.
Updated after being published on a more accurate number of mobile apps using the RevenueCat platform (over 70K instead of over 50K).